Top 350 Simone de Beauvoir Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth?”

— Simone de Beauvoir

302. “One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her femininity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

303. “All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

304. “On the contrary, shared destitution makes the conjugal link reciprocal.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

305. “I asked Isabelle whether she was happy. “I never ask myself, so I suppose the answer is yes.” At all events she likes the moment of waking up. That seems to me a pretty good definition of happiness! It is the same with me: every morning, when I open my eyes, I smile.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

306. “In the afternoons I would sit out on the balcony outside the dining-room; there, level with the tops of the trees that shaded the boulevard Raspail, I would watch the passers-by.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

307. “When you stubbornly give one man a chance, you arbitrarily deny it to another one.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

308. “For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

309. “She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

310. “By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

311. “Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

312. “They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the pretext of a revolution to involve us in any kind of war, said Jardinet.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

313. “I was still keenly aware as in my childhood of the inexplicable nature of my presence here on earth; where had I come from here; where was I going? I often thought about these things with a kind of stupefied horror and used to fill my diary with long self-communings.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

314. “It is impossible to do anything for anyone.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

315. “It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me – they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self – there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

316. “At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

317. “But the answer is obvious: it is easy to believe one is sovereign when alone, to believe oneself strong when carefully refusing to bear any burden.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

318. “Why shouldn’t a mystical theology be possible? ‘I want to touch God or become God,’ I declared in my journal. All through that year I abandoned myself intermittently to these deliriums.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

319. “I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

320. “Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

321. “She asked us to raise the curtain that was covering the window and she looked at the golden leaves of the trees. ‘How lovely. I shouldn’t see that from my flat!’ She smiled. And both of us, my sister and I, had the same thought: it was that same smile that had dazzled us when we were little children, the radiant smile of a young woman. Where had it been between then and now?”

— Simone de Beauvoir

322. “I told myself that as long as there were books I could be sure of being happy.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

323. “Scriassine studied me in turn. “You’re not so dumb, you know. Generally I dislike intelligent women, maybe because they’re not intelligent enough. They always want to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, how terribly smart they are. So all they do is talk and never understand anything. What struck me the first time I saw you was that way you have of keeping quiet.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

324. “Has my watch stopped? No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don’t look at them. Think of something else – anything else: think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

325. “The moment anyone begins making calculations or comparisons, they cease to live for the moment: the present becomes a mere pointer to the future, and all sorts of questions tend to arise.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

326. “Oh, it was easy to be a soldier, it was much less easy to become a man again.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

327. “The truth is, however, that when two individuals detest each other, while being unable to get along without each other, it is not of all human relations the truest and most moving, but rather the most pitiable.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

328. “If I were to share Jaques’ existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

329. “Saint Thomas declared that woman was an “inessential” being, which, from a masculine point of view, is a way of positing the accidental character of sexuality.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

330. “One has no right to make up one’s mind about the future in advance.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

331. “As we talked in the half-darkness I assuaged an old unhappiness.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

332. “Ver cambiar el mundo es a la vez milagroso y desolador.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

333. “The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

334. “Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?′ again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. ‘It’s intolerable you know.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

335. “Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

336. “I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

337. “And it’s the same thing everywhere all the time whether they’re stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it’s the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I’d rather stay at home reading a thriller although they’ve become so dreary nowadays. The TV too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

338. “One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn’t, and I never addressed another word to Him. In my heart of hearts I was very glad He didn’t exist. I should have hated it if what was going on here below had had to end up in eternity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

339. “By her eyes she clung to the world, as by her nails she clung to the sheet, so that she might not be engulfed. ‘Live! Live!”

— Simone de Beauvoir

340. “If she could inherit, she would thus wrongly transmit her paternal family’s riches to that of her husband: she is carefully excluded from the succession.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

341. “One can not, without absurdity, indefinitely sacrifice each generation to the following one; human history would then be only an endless succession of negations which would never return to the positive.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

342. “I hadn’t known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn’t very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

343. “Ze had een hekel aan die anonieme hotelkamers waar zoveel mensen waren geweest zonder sporen achter te laten, waar zij zelf ook geen enkel spoor zou achterlaten. Alles blijft precies hetzelfde als ik er niet meer ben. Dat is wat doodgaan is, dacht ze.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

344. “I could easily understand why Lambert was bored with this peace which gave us back our lives without giving us back our reasons for living.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

345. “If I had rediscovered in Heaven, amplified to infinity, the monstrous alliance of fragility and implacability, of caprice and artificial necessity which had oppressed me since my birth, rather than worship Him I would have chosen damnation.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

346. “But I know my only defense is to answer, “I think it because it is true,” thereby eliminating my subjectivity;.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

347. “Women’s entire history has been written by men.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

348. “The secret of happiness and the very height of artistic achievement is to be like everybody else, yet to be like no one on earth.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

349. “One of the most remarkable features to be noted as we survey the scale of animal life is that as we go up, individuality is seen to be more and more fully developed. At the bottom, life is concerned only in the survival of the species as a whole; at the top, life seeks expression through particular individuals, while accomplishing also the survival of the group.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

350. “We have seen that it is possible to escape the temptations of sadism and masochism when both partners recognize each other as equals; as soon as there is a little modesty and some generosity between men and women, ideas of victory and defeat are abolished: the act of love becomes a free exchange.”

— Simone de Beauvoir